“I have an interest—some might call it an unhealthy interest—in unusual homicides. A bad habit, but very hard to break.”

— SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST

“My problem, quite simply, is that I cannot stay away from an interesting case. An annoying habit, but very hard to break.”

— SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST

“Most people are about as aware of their surroundings as a sea cucumber.”

— SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST

“A person of rare ability seeks to draw me into some sort of malevolent game of his own devising.”

— SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST

When we first meet Aloysius Xingu Leng Pendergast, he is a controversial FBI investigator in the novel, Relic, and in its sequel Reliquary, before assuming the protagonist role in The Cabinet of Curiosities. He is 50ish and slender, with pale blue eyes and a face “so finely modeled that it could have been carved by Michelangelo.” Independently wealthy, his salary at the FBI is an annual honorarium of $1. Pendergast studied Anthropology at Harvard University, graduating summa cum laude, and received a dual Doctor of Philosophy degree in Classics Philosophy from Baliol College, part of Oxford University in England. He hails from a wealthy New Orleans family, but lives in New York City, alternating between his tasteful apartment in the Dakota and a grand, Beaux Arts-style mansion uptown on Riverside Drive. A polyglot, Pendergast demonstrates a mastery of French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Portuguese and Cantonese, and appears semi-fluent in Mandarin and Japanese. He also boasts a lethal expertise in many styles of combat, and practices “an esoteric mental discipline known as Chongg Ran,” which enables him to obtain “startling insights unobtainable any other way.”

Persons of Interest

Diogenes Dagrepont Bernoulli Pendergast

The younger brother of Aloysius Pendergast, he is every bit as capable and intelligent. As a child, Diogenes looked up to his elder brother, who was often cold or intentionally unkind to him. A childhood incident involving Aloysius left Diogenes visually and physically impaired. As he grew older, Diogenes’s desire for revenge developed into a full-blown hatred of his brother.

Constance Greene

A mysterious young lady, “with eyes that seem to possess, unaccountably, a depth of almost limitless experience,” Constance becomes the ward of Agent Pendergast after he discovers her living in the secret honeycomb of passages of his Harlem mansion.

Lt. Vincent D`Agosta

A New York City detective and Pendergast’s close friend, D’Agosta assists Pendergast on controversial cases, often putting his own career on the line.

Captain Laura Haywood

A New York City cop, Captain Laura Haywood is D’Agosta’s wife. She has issues with Pendergast, primarily because of his tactics, but also because he gets D’Agosta into trouble.

Dr. Margo Green

Dr. Margo Green is an ethnopharmacologist and geneticist. She is also a former employee of the New York Museum of Natural History. Margo first appeared in Relic as a graduate student at the museum working under Dr. Whitney Frock. Together with Frock, her coworker Greg Kawakita, and journalist Bill Smithback, she was instrumental in solving the Museum Beast Murders.

Corrine “Corrie” Swanson

A student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Corrie Swanson is an associate of Special Agent Pendergast. Corrie first appeared as a teenage Goth girl in Still Life with Crows and was the featured protagonist in the novel White Fire.

William “Bill” Smithback, Jr.

Bill Smithback, Jr., first appeared in Relic as a writer, commissioned by the museum to write a book about the Superstition Exhibition. He goes on to appear in many other books in the series. Sometimes he is a nuisance, but mostly he is Pendergast’s ally.

Dr. Nora Waterford Kelly

A curator in the Anthropology Department of the New York Museum of Natural History, Nora is the main protagonist in Thunderhead. She was last seen in New Mexico contemplating a job offer from the Santa Fe Archaeological Institute and also appeared in Cemetery Dance.

Helen (von Fuchs) Esterhazy Pendergast

An epidemiologist and pharmaceutical biologist, Helen was the wife of Aloysius Pendergast. First referenced by Pendergast in Relic, she is prominently featured in the three Pendergast novels that make up the “Helen Trilogy” (Fever Dream, Cold Vengeance, and Two Graves).

Alban Pendergast

Alban is the elder twin son of A.X.L. Pendergast and Helen Esterhazy Pendergast.

Tristram Pendergast

The younger of Aloysius Pendergast’s twin sons by his wife Helen, Tristram is tall and slender, with Pendergast’s blond hair, silvery-blue eyes and narrow, patrician face. Due to his unusual upbringing, he is much the opposite of his twin brother Alban.

Proctor

Proctor is Pendergast’s chauffeur and butler, and there is more to the character then we know. It’s clear he has military training, and that training is put to the test in The Obsidian Chamber.

Wren

Wren was introduced for the first time in The Cabinet of Curiosities. He is a registered professional researcher at the New York Public Library. He maintains a friendly professional relationship with Pendergast, and often calls him hypocrite lecteur, a reference to the poem “Au lecteur” by Charles Baudelaire, which was also quoted in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

Mrs. Trask

Mrs. Trask is the housekeeper of Pendergast’s mansion at 891 Riverside Drive in New York. She is described as a pleasant and plump woman.

Places of Interest

location_on New York Museum of Natural History

Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta is assigned as lead detective on the murder of a technician in the Museum’s Osteology Department. The Museum is where he and FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast first joined forces to investigate a disturbing multiple murder case in the novel Relic, and it is a building that D’Agosta had hoped he’d never have reason to enter again…

“Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta began climbing the broad, granite steps of the main entrance to the New York Museum of Natural History. As he did so, he glanced up through the noon light at the vast Beaux-Arts façade—four city blocks long, in the grand Roman style. This building held very bad memories for him…and it seemed like an unpleasant twist of fate that he would find himself entering it again, now of all times.” (Blue Labyrinth)

location_on 891 Riverside Drive

FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast inherited this mansion from his great-great-uncle Antoine Leng Pendergast, otherwise known as Enoch Leng. Leng acquired the mansion, originally an abbey, after he was expelled from the Pendergast family in Louisiana.

“The stately Beaux-Arts mansion on Riverside Drive between 137th and 138th Streets, while carefully tended and impeccably preserved, appeared to be untenanted. On this stormy June evening, no figures paced the widow’s walk overlooking the Hudson River. No yellow glow from within flowed through the decorative oriel windows. The only visible light, in fact, came from the front entrance, illuminating the drive beneath the building’s porte cochere.” (Blue Labyrinth)

location_on Café des Artistes

William Smithback, Jr., treats his wife Nora Kelly to a special anniversary dinner in Cemetery Dance.

“It was the perfect place for a romantic meal. The soft, seductive lighting; the cozy banquettes; the titillating artwork of Howard Chandler Christy—and then, on top of everything else, the sublime food.” (Cemetery Dance)

location_on Brooklyn Botanic Garden - The Palm House

“While examining the map of the Botanic Garden, Constance had mentally sketched out a route of approach. The best point of entry would be the elegant Palm House, much of which had been converted from greenhouse into an event space for hosting social functions. The building had large, single-paned glass windows. The newer greenhouses, on the other hand, had smaller windows, some of them with double-paned glass.” (Blue Labyrinth)

location_on Neptune Room

Nora Kelly ducks into an Upper West Side bar after an upsetting encounter.

“Her eye settled on the closest bar, the Neptune Room: a loud, ostentatious seafood place she had never been into. Never wanted to go into. Never expected to go into. She went in, settled on a stool. The bartender came over right away. ‘What’ll it be?’ ‘Beefeater martini, extra dry.’” (Blue Labyrinth)

location_on Ten Ren Tea and Ginseng Company

One of the finest tea shops in the world, Ten Ren specializes in one of Special Agent Pendergast’s very favorite teas.

“ ‘King’s Tea of Osmanthus Oolong,’ said Pendergast, nodding toward her cup. ‘One of the finest in the world. From bushes grown on the sunny sides of the mountains, new shoots gathered only in the spring.’” (Cabinet of Curiosities)

location_on Inwood Hill Park

“The most persistent stories of animal sacrifice come from Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan. A number of complaints have reached police and animal welfare agencies from the Indian Road and West 214th Street neighborhoods, in which residents claim to have heard the sounds of animals in distress. These animal cries, which residents describe as coming from goats, chickens, and sheep, allegedly issue from a deconsecrated church building at the center of a reclusive community in Inwood Hill Park known familiarly as ‘the Ville.’ Efforts to speak to residents of the Ville and its community leader, the Rev. Eugene Bossong, were unsuccessful.” (Cemetery Dance)

location_on One Police Plaza

“D’Agosta had to admire the genius that went into maintaining the Interrogation Section of One Police Plaza. It was perhaps the last place you could smoke in New York City without being arrested, and as a result the painted cinderblock walls sported a tarry, brownish sheen. They made a point of keeping them grimy. The air was so dead and stale it felt like there must be a corpse hidden somewhere. And the linoleum floor was so old it could have been peeled up and put in a glass case in the Smithsonian.” (Brimstone)

location_on Le Cirque 2000

This restaurant is the site of Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta’s first date with Captain Laura Hayward. In 1974, Sirio Maccioni opened what was destined to become a New York landmark – Le Cirque, which literally translates as “the circus” in French, at the Mayfair Hotel. In 1997, Le Cirque outgrew its original location and relocated to a larger space in the New York Palace Hotel (formerly known as The Helmsley Palace) under the name Le Cirque 2000. This landmark restaurant moved to its current location in the Bloomberg Building on East 58th Street in 2006. But in 2004, when D’Agosta took Hayward out, it would have still been Le Cirque 2000 in The Helmsley Palace.

location_on Hart Island

“The most persistent stories of animal sacrifice come from Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan. A number of complaints have reached police and animal welfare agencies from the Indian Road and West 214th Street neighborhoods, in which residents claim to have heard the sounds of animals in distress. These animal cries, which residents describe as coming from goats, chickens, and sheep, allegedly issue from a deconsecrated church building at the center of a reclusive community in Inwood Hill Park known familiarly as ‘the Ville.’ Efforts to speak to residents of the Ville and its community leader, the Rev. Eugene Bossong, were unsuccessful.” (Cemetery Dance)

Rituals & Diversions

Tea Ceremony

“Carefully, he filled the caddy, measured in the powdered tea, whisked it to a precise consistency, then poured it into two exquisite seventeenth-century bowls. As he sipped, he allowed certain memories to form pictures in his mind, one at a time, lingering over each before moving to the next.” (Cemetary Dance, ch. 7)

Chongg Ran practice

“Pendergast lay on the ground, maintaining acute awareness of his surroundings: the smell of dry weeds, the felling of sticky heat, the stubble and pebbles pressing into his back. He isolated every individual sound, every chirp, rustle, flutter, whisper, down to the faint breathing of his assistant sitting some yards away…” (Still Life with Crows, ch. 38)

Collects Bonsai

Pendergast keeps a collection of Bonsai inside a room of his Dakota apartment, which is described in detail in Reliquary, ch. 26; Cabinet of Curiosities, ch. 9, and Fever Dream, ch. 7.

Family History

Brushes with Death

Poisoned

Shot

Prison Brawl

Mauled

Fever Dream, ch. 3

Bricked Up and left to die

Brimstone, ch. 84

Cambodian Death Camp

Relic, ch. 16 - rumored, not confirmed

The Creators of the World of Pendergast

Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956, and grew up in the deadly boring suburb of Wellesley. Following a distinguished career at a private nursery school--he was almost immediately expelled—he attended public schools and the Cambridge School of Weston. Notable events in his early life included the loss of a fingertip at the age of three to a bicycle; the loss of his two front teeth to his brother Richard's fist; and various broken bones, also incurred in dust-ups with Richard. (Richard went on to write The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event, which tells you all you need to know about what it was like to grow up with him as a brother.)

As they grew up, Doug, Richard, and their little brother David roamed the quiet suburbs of Wellesley, terrorizing the natives with home-made rockets and incendiary devices mail-ordered from the backs of comic books or concocted from chemistry sets.

Lincoln Child

Lincoln Child was born in Westport, Connecticut, which he still calls his hometown (despite the fact that he left the place before he reached his first birthday and now only goes back for weekends).

Lincoln seemed to have acquired an interest in writing as early as second grade, when he wrote a short story entitled Bumble the Elephant (now believed by scholars to be lost). Along with two dozen short stories composed during his youth, he wrote a science-fiction novel in tenth grade called Second Son of Daedalus and a shamelessly Tolkienesque fantasy in twelfth grade titled The Darkness to the North (left unfinished at 400 manuscript pages). Both are exquisitely embarrassing to read today and are kept under lock and key by the author.

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to Nadine Waddell, whose devoted readership and knowledge of the Pendergast series was integral to updating and fact checking the content for this website.